Fred On Everything — Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed

Thoughts on Hornets

Or What We Used to Call Hornets, But Maybe Weren’t
Really

April 3, 2006

I’ve been thinking about hornets. “Why?” you may
ask. Because I’m bored with the little voices and can’t find my
Haldol. Anyway, I claim that hornets show that the human race collectively
isn’t nearly as smart as it thinks it is. Especially about hornets.

The worrisome thing is that hornets know too much. A hornet has practically
no brain, probably a few milligrams or some equally depressing amount. But
consider what the dangerous little spike can do.

A hornet can fly, with precisely controlled speed and angle to the ground.
It can also hover precisely. This is not easy. Controlling the speed and angle
of wings, or whatever the beast controls in (as we say) real time, is not a
freshman’s project in programming. Boeing couldn’t do it.

A hornet can walk over broken ground, effortlessly negotiating obstacles; it
can do this hanging upside down. It is no simple thing to control six jointed
legs. If you think otherwise, talk to a robotics engineer. A hornet can fly
up to a tree branch, adjust its angle in the air, and transition from flight
to walking. Easily.

A hornet can see. How well it can see and what it can see, I don’t know.
I have never been a hornet. Hornets that hunt things can certainly see well
enough to find whatever it is that they hunt. This requires integrating the
output of the multitudinous ommatidia that constitute its compound eyes into
a useful image. Try to figure out how it does it.

Further, it can understand what it is seeing. I’m not sure what I mean
by “understand.” Probably I mean the same thing you do when you
look at something and know what it is. This is a quite different problem from
forming an image. It is easy to get a computer to take a picture, much harder
to get it to “know” what is in the picture.

How does a hornet with virtually no brain do it?

Today the language and modes of thought of computing dominate the biological
sciences. One speaks of behavior as being genetically “programmed” or “hard-wired,” and
of a brain’s “processing power,” of “integrating” information
in “real time.” We are perhaps not always aware that we do this.
When you think in terms of a particular scheme, you can begin seeing it where
it isn’t, begin projecting it onto the world.

When I think of how the control of a hornet’s legs must work (except
of course that it doesn’t have to work the way I believe it must), I
think in terms of sensors of angle and force, of procedures to calculate this
and that. Do hornets do it this way? Maybe not. Scientists as much as other
people struggle to escape their preconceptions or, more usually, don’t
struggle. Many don’t seem to know that they have preconceptions.

A hornet’s aggregate behavior is not trivial. It can navigate almost
infallibly. In a former rural home in Virginia, I watched them set off across
a bean field of a hundred and fifty yards, apparently going to the woods on
the other side. They came back. In the jungles of South America, dim under
thick canopies, with dense undergrowth, I have seen nests hanging. The insects
fly though the growth without getting lost.

Hornets know how to build nests—what to chew, how to find it, when to
chew it, and how to paste it together to make (depending on the variety of
hornet) a smooth hanging grey gourd full of elaborate cells. This begins to
be an awful lot of behavior contained in virtually no brain. (Stray thought:
What is the unit of behavior per neuron?)

Hornets know how to mate. Mating with a hornet is not to be undertaken casually,
and I do not recommend it to the reader without professional instruction. However,
hornets seem to do it. In the default computer-think of the sciences (“default,” I
say automatically) the explanation might be as follows: The hornet’s
pheromone receptors send a medium-priority interrupt to the central nervous
system which then branches to its mating procedure. Click, click, click, like
mechanized tinker toys.

I wonder. I do not know whether hornets mate while flying, as ants do, but
it must be beastly difficult to copulate and fly at the same time. Think in
terms of airline pilots and you will see what I mean. In terms of computing,
mating is an extraordinarily tricky problem. Both bugs have to “want” to
do it, recognize each other, know how to align various body parts without error,
and produce the needed physiological responses at the right moment.

I know how I would try to write the program to do these things. I do not know
how I would make it work. Especially in bare milligrams of brain. Something
curious is going on here, methinks, something that we don’t understand.

Yet further, hornets know how to protect themselves and their nests. (I have
stepped on one barefoot. I can assure you that they know how to protect themselves.)
This, like so much of their behavior, is not as simple as it might seem. Stinging
in itself may be a reflexive spasm, though hornets that paralyze their prey
with stings have to know exactly where to sting. (How do they know?) You generally
do not want to miss with a tarantula. Their overall defensive behavior is a
tad more complex.

They have to decide that they are being threatened. How? I could come up with
some function, probably silly or at least inadequate, of apparent size, nearness
to nest, velocity, and so on. (“Function.” Back to computers.)
That’s a lot of calculation in no brain. In any event, being able to
simulate a process in a computer doesn’t mean that the computer is doing
it the same way the hornet is. Computers today clock at several gigahertz.
A hornet’s barely-brain runs on slow mushy diffusion of chemicals across
wet synapses. They are doing something very different.

Further, disturbed hornets look to be angry. They give every indication of
being aggressive. Now, it is possible that I am anthropomorphizing. It is also
possible that I am not. A thing that appears to be angry may in fact be angry.

Unless I fall into solipsism, I have to assume that if you begin screaming
and throwing things at me, you are angry. On equally good evidence, I assume
that when my dog behaves playfully or affectionately, she is so. I am not sure
why I have to believe that an apparently infuriated hornet isn’t.

Now, add up all hornetary behavior, including a lot we haven’t touched
on—communication between hornets, caring for the young, and so on—and
ask how much more complex, if at all, is the behavior of whales, who have brains
you could sleep in.

Hornets? I think the little monsters know, within the limits of their world,
exactly what they are doing. I am not so sanguine about humans.

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